The PR team behind the US launch of Duke Nukem Forever has apologised for threatening to blacklist publications who gave the eagerly anticipated title bad write-ups.
After the game received critical brickbats, it seems topping the games sales charts wasn't enough of a consolation for The Redner Group.
One staffer posted threats …

Speaking of blacklisting

Speaking of community,

When did they decide to retract their threat? Before or after they realized that only the Karachi Medical Gazette had written a vaguely positive piece, and so would be the only ones to receive a review copy?

Titles are pointless

Maybe if their PR team had sent out copies of the PC version for review rather than the horrendous 360 port they wouldn't be in this position? I doubt we'd have seen any ratings above 75%* but the reviews may have been a bit more balanced (something along the lines of that done by PC Gamer).

*That's a review percentage, not a real world percentage where mediocre games get 50% and perfection gets 100%

PC Version seems no better.

From what I understand, the game seems to be overall underwhelming, and this goes to the fundamentals of the game, not to anything attributable to porting. We seem to just have another case of "Too Late, Too Little".

This reminds me...

It also reminds me of..

..A PC Pro review which started "XXXXX asked us to review YYYYY on the condition that they could pull the review if it was unfavorable. It didn't occur to them that we could simply go out and buy it then review it without censorship.... So we declined, and went out shopping". (I paraphrased a bit)

I can't remember if the subsequent review slated or approved of the review. Either way, the review column after that regularly stated "Our editorials are independant, and are not influenced by our advertising department, we can simply go out and buy anything we want to do a review of". ( I paraphrase again).

I think the Duke people probably recognised this, and that nowdays people are more ready to believe reviews that point out "we're independant, look we paid our own money to review this".

Advance copies

Often reviewers get given a copy of the game a week or so in advance of it appearing in shops, so they can spend time playing it and publish an in-depth review by the time the game is available to buy. If the reviewer has to buy their own copy, they have to wait until release, and their reviews will be late. It seems a lot of games sales occur within a week of release, so the reviewer would miss out on a lot of excitement and buzz.

If they keep producing such high quality games...

I'm very happy to see the coercive blacklisters named and shamed. :)

This (attempting to) blacklist media outs is unfortunately an all to common occurrence and its been around for a long time, its just that now the blacklisters can be far more easily named and shamed online.

This blacklisting is basically blackmail. The news providers seek to force news organizations to give them a favorable review or they threaten to withhold future news from the news companies and so as news companies need news to survive, its literally blackmailing them to try to put the news companies at a disadvantage, leaving only the crawling news companies to suck up to the blackmailing news providers.

This is happening (and has happened) in all areas of news. Even political news organizations are treated this way by the governments (who try to delay and withhold future political news from news organisations that give them a bad review) and it has to be stamped out. So I think its great news these blacklisters are getting named and shamed. :)

Back when we had only a few big corporate news outlets, (e.g. the old Murdoch like media empires of this world), then the blacklisting would have worked much more effectively, (because back then, the most corrupt media companies would have been at an advantage as they simply just played along with what the blacklisters wanted, whilst the more honest media companies would have been placed at a disadvantage as they would have got blacklisted. (In hindsight it goes a long way to explaining the rise of the corruption inherent in old media companies).

But now we have the Internet, so someone somewhere is going to leak any attempt at blacklisting and news spreads in minutes, so no advantage in trying to withhold news. So I find it very interesting this all gives new media companies another advantage over old corporate media, with their biased reporting. Also ironically now the withholding of news can become the news online, so the blackmailers won't win online.

Good on TheReg (and thank you) for reporting this attempted coercion. :)

Hmmm

EAT THESE !

There's a diffrence between negitive criticism and being an all out abyss of human suffering and angst bent on pouring out your hatred for yourself in reviews. if a review is below the belt then what makes the person giving such vile reviews think they will be privileged to anything ever from the person/Co. being dragged through the mud. There is a limit to what one can/should say and still remain a respectable author.

Jeff Gerstmann, Macro Level

ta da, right there is the reason that potals and sites which only deal in games only every give out 80% reviews as a "bad score", and this sort of crap will continue hilever there are kids that cant discern between a rehashed press packet and an actual review. which seeing as the kids in question are 8-14 year old, is prettymuch never.

this is like the story about google and facebook playing dirty tricks with PR companies. the content itself isnt the story. the story is that Redner group is so fucking incompetant as to put it out there on display.

One thing I find really interesting

Apparently, some people are blaming the console version for the amount of negativity in the reviews.

Independantly of the gameplay, which should not change between an Xbox and a PC, there appears to be technical issues and exaggeratedly long load times.

I remember a time where console fanatics were heralding the "death of the PC" due to the "perfect accomodation" of a known platform with set characteristics versus the heterogenous nature of the PC gaming hardware.

Ported the otherway

This is what you get when you port a game from the PC platform to a Console, textures too big to render properly, levels to large to load quickly etc.

You cant just recommend they get a graphics card with more memory for their XBox.

When you go from console to PC you tinstead get interfaces that believe the mouse doesn't exist, forcing you to push the "Shoulder buttons"(?) on your keyboard to access your inventory and other such nonsense.

The X-Box has made this alot worse as

a) Microsoft lean on PC game manufacturers to release on X-Box as well (and first)

b) X-box uses much the same API interfaces as windows , making is easy for lazy developers just to cross compile the game for PC (or vice versa) without bothering to actually modify it for the platform.